On 1 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB officer and by then a British citizen, met two of his former colleagues, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, in Mayfair and drank a cup of tea with them. What happened next must count as the century’s most gruesome crime so far. The tea taken by Litvinenko was laced with a dose of polonium-210 and he died in agony in UCH several days later.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £10.99. Tel: 08430 600. Robert Service has written biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. His most recent book is The End of the Cold War, 1985–1991.
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